The German blogger and historian Marie Sophie Hingst was stripped of her Blogger of the Year 2017 prize, as investigations revealed that her stories about her family who perished during the Holocaust were contrived.

As they say where I come from: Ol boy is pretty good! Jim Goad highlights two truths. 1.) That Whites (in particular White males) are under attack with pinpoint specific examples. 2.) And with more pinpoint examples that today’s progressive (and if I may add fanatical) liberals are the biggest hypocrites – even more than politicians. If you ask what is truth then you get it in a shot from the hip style from Mr. Jim Goad. Clearly has his hand on the pulse of today’s culture. Powerful, hard-hitting and honest; I highly recommend it for those who are interested in the real state of affairs. I know his critics have to hate him because the truth hurts. I highly recommend his work; he is the Dirty Harry of Journalism.

Although this evasion is predictable, it’s quite remarkable to see a more or less open admission from two allegedly masterful historians that they don’t possess facts sufficient to dispel the very “myth” they set out to challenge. To describe any such presentation of facts as a “futile attempt” seems intellectually flaccid; a concession of the weakness of one’s case.

But what is really presented here, of course, is the standard structure of Jewish historiography: avoid the facts, downplay them if concession is absolutely necessary, and move the discussion into abstractions and sophistry. Taking a page from the ADL playbook, Browning mewls coyly that “a small kernel of truth underpinned the stereotype of the Jewish Bolshevik,” but insists, regarding Communism, that “the Jew as “the face of the revolution” was a “culturally constructed” perception.” We therefore arrive at the familiar position where facts don’t matter and everything Jews don’t like is triumphantly declared a mere construct. . . .

Jewish economic competition in the modern period is caricatured as an irrational “image,” and Jewish war profiteering is simply an “accusation.” Epithets, images, accusations, and the passive and innocent Jew. In sociological-psychological terms this is classic Freud and Frankfurt School, and in historiography it is classic Langmuir.

As with Langmuir’s sophistry, such assertions require a significant amount of either duplicity or cognitive dissonance, or perhaps both. The number of texts covering historical Jewish black-market activity alone is astonishing. We know from one Stanford-published history, for example, that in France in 1941, 90% of black market traders in one province were Jews.[6] Similarly, in Mark Roodhouse’s Oxford-published Black Market Britain: 1939–1955, it is remarked that Jews were massively over-represented in prosecutions for black-market activity in London during the 1940s. . . .

We’re again in very familiar territory: when you feel you can’t avoid a fact (“Jews were invariably disproportionately represented”), and you can’t downplay it, then explain it by way of prejudice (“they were not welcome”). The problem with snapshots of history like this, as I’ve explained many times before, is what I’ve come to term a “cropped timeline explanation” — something that is extremely common in all Jewish and philosemitic historiography concerning anti-Semitism. When faced with an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact involving Jewish behavior (Leftism, usury, financial crime, pornography, etc.) one starts with assumptions of anti-Jewish prejudice and works from there. Jews are on the Left? It must be because they were excluded from the Right. Problems begin to arise when the question is asked why Jews were excluded or viewed as socially or culturally oppositional in the first place. Here, “irrational prejudice” is the last resort, but beyond it, when faced with further interrogation of that idea and the even deeper historical context, nothing is there. One is confronted with blank stares, rhetorical dead ends, and a factual wasteland.

By now I was already getting the sense that Browning was drowning in his own review, under the sheer weight of his own evasions and contortions. The questions, for any reader, were surely multiplying. Were Jews over-represented in Communism or not? If yes, how is the idea of Jewish leftism a myth? If the ‘myth’ can’t be debunked with facts, how can it be debunked by a work of academic sophistry that labels it a cultural construct? The contortions only worsen. . . .

Thus, we are treated to a review of Gerrits by Eliezer Ben-Rafael of Tel-Aviv University, who asserts that Gerrits tackles “the myth of Jewish Communism” by presenting “the fascinating stories of Jewish Communism and Jewish Communists.” If debunking ideas with proof of their veracity wasn’t enough, it’s explained in one banal revelation that the myth combines “anti-Semitism and anti-Communism,” and has a link to reality in the fact that “in effect, many Jews were prominently involved in Communism not only in Russia, but also in the Hungarian and Bavarian revolutions of 1917 and, after the Second World War, in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Poland, and Bulgaria.”[12] Jewish Communism is thus clearly a myth because Jews were prominently involved in Communist revolutions in several countries over several decades. Right. . . .

An excellent example of evasion along these lines is Hanebrink’s discussion of Béla Kun. Hanebrink argues [p.25] that there was “nothing meaningful at all” about Kun’s Jewish background while elsewhere [p.16] noting that of the 47 people’s commissars gathered by Kun for the 1919 Hungarian Soviet regime, 30 were fellow Jews. Clearly feeling that his own arguments are unconvincing, Hanebrink follows up his earlier surrender on the issue of facts with [p.25]: “Truly understanding the hopes, fears and motivations of any particular Jewish revolutionary in all their irreducible complexity is ultimately a task best undertaken by a biographer.” . . .

Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is, ultimately, an extremely strange book, but all too typical of contemporary writing on Jewish history. It is thick on promises and thin in substance. It is characterized by glaring omissions and a deeply insincere analysis accompanied by a cloying philosemitism. Interestingly, the text lacks any semblance of intellectual confidence, and one feels that Hanebrink, who is presumably not himself Jewish, is surely aware of what he is creating: a blatant pro-Jewish apologetic. The reasons why a White academic might want to produce something like this are not difficult to surmise. As with Christopher Browning, such endeavors are massively incentivized. Despite being unoriginal, low on facts, and poor in analysis, Hanebrink, associate professor of history at Rutgers, has written a book published by a prestigious academic publisher (perhaps the most prestigious) and has been lavishly praised in the major organs of the mainstream media. The message from our latter-day commissars is clear: “Sell out and we’ll make you a star.”

In one medieval village game, peasants with both hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of their cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the creature’\冱 frantic claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement.

Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs until, to the laughter of spectators, he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless.

Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it.

The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered.

It may be that the less than tender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.

Several years ago, before I discovered Popper, I read Thucydides and his account of the Peloponnesian War. After about 150 pages of reading I began to despise the Athenians deeply. However it had not occurred to me that my feelings were being manipulated by the omissions of a long dead author. However one day I picked up the Open Society and its Enemies and in that book I discovered that Thucydides was an anti-democrat belonging to the autocratic faction of the Athenian Aristocracy. With this insight came a greater appreciation of the text. Whilst reading Thucydides i had ignored all the hints that he was a rabid anti-democrat and that with the spartans he had actively conspired to destroy the greatest civilization ever to emerge in the Peloponnese

***

The Spartans unlike the athenians left virtually nothing. Their cities were like villages, decrepit and disorganised. All they were good for was war and the yearly pogrom of slaves. They also opposed free trade and bNned their nobles from owning gold. In effect they were proto-totalitarians who were only good at breeding armed sociopaths. When the Persians came, they allied with them to defeat their kinsmen. They then imposed an autocracy on Athens which lasted a few years before it was destroyed. Plato, as you may know was a member (admirer) of the anti-democratic athenian faction. His Republic is a mirror of the Spartan “Constitution” although in this case, the ruler is a philosopher such as Plato aspired to be.

***

Roman, the man was a rabid anti-democrat with strong oligarchical inclinations. One of the best works out there is
A.H.M. Jones’, ‘The Athenian democracy and its critics’, Cambridge Historical
Journey. 11.1 (1953), 1-26.

“I think children today have a tough time, because they don’t have the freedom to run around as I did — and they have so many scheduled activities.”

In her youth, she points out, “mothers did not work outside the home; they worked on the inside. And because all the mothers were home — 99 percent of them, anyway — all mothers kept their eyes on all the children.”

This is a forbidden bit of history that I’m quietly obsessed with. The truth is very dark and disturbing.

“When the Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of both the people and cultures they came to rule.” — Kevin MacDonald

This 17,000-word book review by Kevin MacDonald of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is published here in its entirety as an invaluable work of reference. Abridged versions of the same review exist elsewhere (see here and here), but neither of these do justice to the information-packed scholarly monograph that MacDonald was to write soon after the publication of Slezkine’s book in 2004.

Why is this review of such importance?

Because MacDonald was one of the first to highlight the fact that Slezkine’s bombshell of a book had, perhaps inadvertently, let the cat out of the bag: it had revealed many embarrassing facts about the Bolshevik Revolution that Slezkine’s fellow Jews might have preferred to see suppressed or given far less prominence; namely, that Jews had played a leading role in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and in the Red Terror that followed. They had made themselves Stalin’s “willing executioners” and been directly responsible for the mass murder of millions of white Russian Christians and the destruction of their churches.

All the horrors of Communism from 1917 to 1953—the collectivization of farms, the dispossession and indiscriminate slaughter of the very proletariat in whose name the Communists professed to rule, the slave labor of the gulags, the horrendous tortures practiced by the cheka, the starvation genocide of 7 million people in Ukraine—all these unspeakable crimes would never have taken place without Jewish money and heavy Jewish participation.

Countless history books have been written about the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, many of them by Jews, without the slightest hint being given that international Jewry was in large part to blame for the carnage. If anything, the Jews are presented in a rosy light and shown to be among the many victims of Stalin’s reign of terror. This enormous deception persists to this day.

Suppose you could a) improve your own IQ by 10 points, or b) improve the IQs of your countrymen (but not your own) by 10 points. Which would do more to increase your income? The answer is (b), and it’s not even close. The latter choice improves your income by about 6 times more than the former choice. . . .

Jones devotes much of the book to explaining why this empirical regularity exists. Many of the reasons that he discusses are political or cultural. For instance, he presents evidence showing that high-IQ countries tend to have less corruption. He also presents evidence from laboratory experiments showing that high-IQ people tend to cooperate with each other more than low-IQ people.

Jones also discusses some reasons from microeconomics that help explain the empirical regularity. Specifically, he shows that your own productivity tends to increase when you work around people who have high IQs. . . .

The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and A2, are highly skilled—if they are assigned to either task they are guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2, are less skilled—specifically, for either task each has a 50% probability of breaking the vase.

Now suppose you are worker A1. If you team up with A2, you produce a vase every attempt. However, if you team up with B1 or B2, then only 50% of your attempts will produce a vase. Thus, your productivity is higher when you team up with A2 than with one of the B workers. Something similar happens with the B workers. They are more productive when they are paired with an A worker than with a fellow B worker.

So far, everything I’ve said is probably pretty intuitive. But here’s what’s not so intuitive. Suppose you’re the manager of the vase company and you want to produce as many vases as possible. Are you better off by (i) pairing A1 with A2 and B1 with B2, or (ii) pairing A1 with one of the B workers and A2 with the other B worker?

If you do the math, it’s clear that the first strategy works best. Here, the team with two A workers produces a vase with 100% probability, and the team with the two B workers produces a vase with 25% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces 1.25 vases per time period. With the second strategy, both teams produce a vase with 50% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces only one vase per time period.

The example illustrates how workers’ productivity is often interdependent—specifically, how your own productivity increases when your co-workers are skilled.

The example generates an even more remarkable implication. It says that, if you are a manager of a company (or the central planner of an entire economy), then your optimal strategy is to clump your best workers together on the same project rather than spreading them out amongst your less-able workers.

The parable has some interesting implications for immigration policy. . . .

The argument Singh makes in his book is simple and compelling: Coup attempts are best understood as coordination games, or “situations in which each individual has an incentive to do what others are doing, and therefore each individual’s choices are based on his or her beliefs about the likely actions of others.” Instead of thinking about coups as battles (e.g., the side with the greatest military power will win) or coups as elections (e.g., the side with the most public support will win), Singh pushes us to think of coup success as being driven by coup-makers’ ability to get others to believe that their coup attempt will be successful.

How do coup-makers convince others their coup attempt will be successful? They convince military actors that the success of the coup has the support of almost everybody in the military and that any possible resistance is minor. One way coup makers have done this is by seizing the main radio broadcast facility.